Authors

Discussion

In the context of World War II, millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe were forced to leave their home towns and/or countries and found themselves in new places as refugees, displaced persons or other types of forced migrants. While the act of writing about their experiences often served as a personal coping strategy as well as a way of bearing witness, it also raised the question of how to turn (auto)biographical experience into words and, consequently, into (individual as well as collective) memory. The paper examines writing strategies employed by Polish authors in their works, and analyses their choice of topics (such as violence, loss, identity, language) as well as the representation of these topics. By taking into account works written in Polish and works written in Yiddish, the paper provides a comparative perspective on the topic of forced migrants' memory writing.